This is a condensed version of Candy’s 2007 Master’s of Urban Planning thesis at Columbia University called Hello, Neighbors!: Outdoor Flyers, Online Forums, and an Eye Towards Collective Neighborhood Communication. We have more and more tools to reach out across the world, but it’s still hard to reach out to your entire neighborhood. Residents are brimming with local knowledge and share a common space. How can we better design our public spaces to share information, self-organize, and become effective agents in our communities? Two forms of communication, outdoor flyers and online forums, allow individuals to reach out to a large population in public space. By documenting these messages in three NYC neighborhoods – the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and Cobble Hill – Candy developed a typology for how these forums are currently used and conducted low-fi experiments online and offline.

Communication tools are just as important of an infrastructure system as roads, sewers, and electricity. Flyers are spread throughout the interstitial spaces of the city and lampposts have become unofficial billboards for local communication. In a built environment where citizens’ flyers are illegal yet businesses can shout about their products on an increasing number of public surfaces, we need to consider whether public space can be better designed so that it is not necessarily allocated to the highest bidder but also reflects and facilitates our needs as a community and as individuals.

Thesis advisor: Robert Beauregard, Thesis reader: Sarah Williams